PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) buses are used commonly in personal computers. PCI chipsets are readily available. PCI buses operating at 33 MHz, 66 MHz and 133 MHz are currently available. However, PCI buses are undesirably inefficient for handling bursty data transfers. In various applications there is a need to transfer a bursty data stream between components.
It is known that the efficiency with which data can be transferred across a PCI bus can be increased by sending data in long bursts. Transferring a burst of data across a PCI bus incurs some overhead. It takes a system-dependent amount of time to set up a PCI bus to make a burst transfer. After the transfer is established a DWord (32 bits) can be transferred on every PCI clock cycle. Where the data transfer is bursty it is not always possible to organize the data into long bursts for transfer across a PCI bus.
There have been efforts to improve the efficiency of data transfer by providing microprocessors which have longer word capabilities between 32 and 64 bytes. Standard compilers typically do not support these capabilities. This makes it necessary to program in assembly language to take advantage of longer word transfer capabilities.
Another way to increase the efficiency with which data is transferred across a PCI bus involves providing an external DMA component. The DMA component performs burst data transfers. However each data transfer involves overhead such as setting up source and destination pointers before the burst transfer. This is not efficient unless the bursts are long.
Davis et al., U.S. Pat. No. 6,298,407 discloses a PCI-to-PCI bridge which includes a control register. Values in the control register specify storage conditions to be met by read and write queues of the bridge.
There are many applications, including various telecommunication applications, where it would be desirable to use a PCI bus but a PCI bus cannot maintain a desired throughput due to the bursty nature of the data being transmitted.